The Bone Orchard
by Sally Mn
Summary: When Ezra was shot in Serpents... the money wasn't there to save him. And it's now All Souls Eve...    Series 2 AU
1. Chapter 1

**The Bone Orchard**

Dusk had fallen, cold and gray. Now there was a dull, ashen moon shining fitfully through frayed threads of cloud and throwing faint, miserable light on the small town.

From the balcony, he could just make out the graveyard - the bone orchard, as he'd heard it called before - drab, badly tended and dismally bare. It had never touched him before, just how barren it was, but then he knew none of the folk buried there, with their shabby headstones, worn epitaphs, and long-forgotten names.

He turned his head, looking back into the dimly lit clinic; from where he stood, he could just make out the curve of a too-pale face on a thin pillow, and one limp hand fallen from the bed.

Most likely Ezra expected to be forgotten before long... and it might be too late, far too late, to tell him otherwise. The thought of putting him in that desolate ground hurt Larabee like the hell they both professed not to believe in, that Josiah even now was praying for him to escape.

Chris looked again at the shadowy figure down in the bone orchard, the gaunt suggestion of a man, half-hidden in darkness, standing under the dead tree.

It was All Souls' Eve.

His hands clenched a little on the rough wood. "You can't have him," he whispered to the darkness.

The damn business with the governor, his hired assassin, and Mary Travis was over, in an ugly, unsatisfactory way that might leave the evil festering, but thankfully gone from his own. And the even more damned problem of the $10,000 would be too, if they knew where it was. Last thing anyone knew, Josiah had given it to Ezra, he said 'for safekeeping', but when Standish had thrown himself in the way of a bullet meant for Mary, the money hadn't been on him, or anywhere else they could find. Wherever the man had hidden it, it was staying hidden. Ezra was always good at hiding...

Not that any of the six of them cared overmuch about the money, except for the trouble in town if folks thought it was somewhere for the taking. Personally, Chris didn't care if they did. It wasn't worth the life it was costing. If Ezra had taken the money and run... he pushed that thought away, because it would most likely be his own, or Mary's, life slowly bleeding out under Nathan's desperate hands. Right now he didn't care.

The ghosts of his own words, his mistrust and his harshness, came back to him, mockingly tossed on his mind's echo into the darkness, and it hurt.

He could now see Nathan's shadow across the bed. Buck was also in there, refusing to leave, trying with the life and warmth that he always had more than enough of, to will his friend back from wherever Ezra seemed to be. JD and Vin were on patrol, knowing as they all did that trouble could come looking while their own trouble overwhelmed them; and truth be told, both were grateful for something to do other than wait. Chris himself wouldn't leave until it was over... one way or the other.

He turned away, back towards the bone orchard.

And he recalled, as in a nightmare, a tale told to him long ago, a chilling tale of how if you saw the ghost of a man in the churchyard on All Souls' Eve, that man was meant to die before the years' end. Or something like that, Josiah might know the whole of it, but Josiah was praying, as wracked with doubt for his part in Ezra's dying as Chris, and no one was going to make it harder by saying the words - dying, death - aloud until they had to.

And anyway, whatever it was that he could see, like a sere shadow made of the night, it wasn't in the churchyard, but that didn't help Chris believe right now.

"You ain't him." He could almost convince himself of that, half-afraid, half-desperate to see the indistinct figure that might have been a man in a threadbare, ragged, blood-red coat and a low-brimmed hat that hid the face... "You ain't him. And you can't have him."

**~777~**

_Somewhere, very dark and cold and quiet, he is trying to remember. But all he can think about are cards, spinning from his fingers into his hat on a hard wooden floor._

_He had done that once, in a cell._

_He's dimly, vaguely sure it isn't the same place, the same time, the same... anything. But still, even as they fall from his hands into the shadows, he is looking with his mind's eye for an ace of spades. Everything will be all right if he can find the ace of spades._

_He has to tell... someone that the money... what money?... someone's money is with the ace of spades._

**~777~**


	2. Chapter 2

**~777~**

Chris woke with a start, from a confused dream of dancing in the main street while watched by half the town, dancing with a skeleton in purple lace and black curls and looking up to see that vague ragged-coated figure again, there on the balcony of the clinic where someone... someone...

"Ez," he thought he said it aloud.

And woke, all but falling out of the rocking chair by Ezra's bedside as he did so.

Nathan, silently fussing over his patient as he was so good at doing, gave him a strange look but didn't speak, just laid a cloth over Ezra's forehead and turned back to his bottles and potions and tonics and teas. None of them would be of any use till the man woke up, but for Nathan they were something else to do.

"Buck -?" He said it more to break the silence.

"Gone to check on the others," Nathan said in a low voice, little more than a sigh. "Told him to get some rest, none of us are gonna be much use t'morrow anyway, but things go on whether -" he stopped. "Knowin' him, he'll be back."

Chris nodded. In the lamplight he could see no change in Ezra's still, almost waxen face, and nothing else seemed to matter.

It reminded him of deathbed photographs he'd seen once, framed and displayed on an aunt's fancy-papered wall. He didn't want to say the words, didn't want to hear them said, but he'd learned the hard way that nothing was better just 'cause it was kept silent. "What do you think, Nate?"

The other man shook a weary head. "Ask me in the mornin' Chris. We've done all we can..."

_And it don't change what we did, said, before._ _But,_ Chris added to himself, _some said more than others._

"It's down to him and the Lord now."

_Or someone, or something else._ He didn't believe in ghosts, but hell, not believing never stopped plenty of folks being scared of 'em.

He stood restlessly, went out to the balcony, stared down towards the badly moonlit graveyard. There was no one there, of course. No reason why there should be.

From the dark street heading northwards, though, Vin slid out of the darkness and walked towards the lamplight; Buck joined him before they reached the steps and looked up with eyes still holding out hope, even if that hope was uncertain and wearing thin.

Hope was something Buck was damned good at, of course. Chris knew that as well as any man could, though _he'd _lost any knack for it himself long ago, in a dawn filled with smoke he could still taste, and heartbreak that was only just fading. But though he couldn't hold on to hope, his men always managed to do it between them, and he wasn't ready to tell them to loosen that hold. Not yet.

For himself, he could still hold on through dogged, stubborn will. And he held on to the fact, that he knew damn well, that Standish had always shown both the hope and the equally stubborn tenacity in spades...

"You can't take him," he whispered to no one, no one at all, "whatever y'are."

**~777~**

Vin crossed to the bed, looking silently down at Ezra's face. His own was closed, oddly calm and hard to read, even for the man who couldn't recall the last time he'd not _been _able to read Vin's face as clear as day. But Larabee had already noticed that something in the dark, harsh night air seemed to make seeing clear... more troublesome than usual.

"Any problems out on patrol?" he said, more for some sort of normality than because he much cared. Tanner would have said so straight off if needed; the vigil - whether by a deathbed or not - didn't mean they didn't have a duty to the innocents who had no part of what was happening.

_Deathbed._ Chris rejected the word, refused to give it power.

"Not that ya'd notice. Coyotes howlin' tonight, fit to wake the -" Vin stopped, and shook his head, and reached for the chair beside the bed, only to find that Buck had got there first, and had settled in with the air of a man who wasn't about to move again for hell or high heaven or anything else. With the shadow of a sigh, Vin settled down on his haunches against the wall, a similar air surrounding him. "Think they spooked JD a mite. He's down seein' t'the horses, be up later."

"Y'both ought to rest up."

"Like you, cowboy?" The words were very soft. Tanner _knew_ where he'd been all these hours.

"I slept." And in that damned uncomfortable chair, and he had the pains from the neck through to the ass to show for it. The odd, fleeting thought came to him that the least Ez could do to make up for what he was puttin' them all through was to pull through. "You see anyone down near the church?"

"'Sides Josiah, nope. He's still prayin', don't think we're gonna get'im up here till it's needful."

_Till Ez needs him,_ more words for Chris to reject.

If the man died, like this, thinkin' god knows what and takin' all those things they said and thought into the darkness, part of Josiah would go with him.

"Anyone in the graveyard?" He heard himself ask.

They both looked puzzled, as well they might. But then Vin was hardly likely to know an old ghost story from the other side of the world, and Buck, well he didn't read that much anyway, and his tastes ran to lustier, living tales. Chris had a feeling the one who might have recognized the dark little fable was the one he couldn't help fearin' for...

Hell, most likely, Ezra would laugh at him if he knew, but staring at the far too still, far too silent man in the bed, Chris didn't much care. Right now, he'd give anything to hear that mocking laugh, anywhere but in the fear-tossed echoes of his own mind.

"Did you?"

"Nope," Buck answered for the both of them. "You think there might be?"

"Thought I saw..." He wasn't even aware that he had spoken again, but the way they glanced at each other, then back at him, brought him back to his senses. "Tramp, probably. We'll see t'him tomorrow, if he shows again."

If...

**~777~**


	3. Chapter 3

**~777~**

_If..._

_Though it's as dark and as cold as the hell he doesn't believe in, he thinks he can see his own hands, sere and almost skeletal, flipping seven cards over and over as silky-smooth as ever._

_Somewhere in the darkness there's pain, and regret, and wishes, and a need to tell someone something... he just doesn't know what anymore._

_But he will, once the cards come right._

_His hand brushes over his jacket, he knows its the dark red one, by the feel and the softness... and the ragged burned edges of a hole where his heart - or the money... what money?... someone's money - should be. _

_But he keeps flipping his cards. Even though it's slower now, getting slower and harder as the night draws on, somehow he knows he just has to find one card, and everything will come right._

**~777~**

Close to midnight, he thought he saw a change, as faint and light as a last sigh, on Ezra's face.

They were all of them here now. JD was leaning against Buck's legs as if for warmth against the chilling fear, but Josiah stayed back in the shadows, gripping the bone cross he wore with big, white-knuckled hands. Vin was still crouched against the wall, hadn't moved at all. Nathan slipped between them softly, silently, refusing either to hope or give up hope, though there was little he could do now but bathe cold skin, keep the wound clean, wait for the man to wake...

As for Chris himself, he had been standing at the foot of the small iron bed so long and so still, he ached.

It wasn't as if he, as if they all, hadn't watched death at work before. He knew that, if he turned his head to look, he'd see it on their faces, knew that they were all thinking back to family and friends - and, with Josiah and Nathan at least, of others they had sought to help. But if they saw what he did, they didn't show it. None of them.

And he wasn't sure what it was anyway. Might just have been a shadow. Might just have been his own tired mind playing tricks. Might have...

He couldn't watch anymore.

He just _couldn't_ watch one of his own die anymore.

Without a word, Larabee turned and walked out.

**~777~**

... And stared from the balcony into the night that now hid the graveyard from view.

The night was cold. _He _was cold, in body and in mind, and with the cold came an anger deeper and harsher than the one he recalled lashing Standish with, over things that seemed so petty now - money, and politics, and greed and guilt. None of it _mattered _right now, none of it mattered except as the things that had brought them to this, to what had been said, what had been thought, what had been damaged and broken... what couldn't ever be put right, body or soul, if Ezra died on All Souls Eve.

And he needed it to be put right, but he had no illusions about God or the Devil, or Death itself, caring about what he or anyone else needed.

Something snapped, a twig under his boot, and that was when he knew he'd gone down the stairs and out onto the street, and was striding towards the bone orchard at the edge of the town.

In the murk, he could see that thin, ragged figure under the winter-bare tree in the outermost corner - the bare, unloveliest spot in a bare, unlovely place, sitting with its back against one of the oldest, shabbiest gravestones in that corner by a broken fence.

"You ain't him," Chris snarled, hand going to his gun instinctively, though how much good it'd do, he couldn't think and didn't much care, "whatever you are, you ain't him, and you _can't fuckin' have him!"_

It scrambled up almost clumsily, clutching at the edges of the dirty red-brown coat it was wrapped in with thin, wasted hands. He knew that coat. He knew that coat very well... and something icy washed over him, which might have been the last of his common sense for all he knew.

He _knew_ that coat.

"What the hell are you doing with one of my men's cast-offs?" he grated, remembering too late that the damn thing had been thrown in the trash as irreparable even by the best seamstress in town.

Whoever it was seemed to be staring at him from under a battered black hat, he couldn't see the face to be certain. He gripped his gun a little tighter, fighting off the urge to shoot and be done with it. The straggling threads of light shifted, flickered onto a death-white face as gaunt and scrawny as an old skeleton under a flat black hat. Into milk-white eyes flecked with what might have been dull, pale green.

In the darkness, his gun flew up, his hand tightened to fire.

**~777~**

_There is someone in the darkness with him... someone for whom the darkness is everything just now. Someone who found light, and might lose some of it again. Might lose it for good this time._

_Mister Lar'b...? ...there is a name, but he can't call to mind a name._

_Someone who had said... had thought..._

_No matter, it will all be over in a while. He reaches out, reaching for another card... _

**~777~**


	4. Chapter 4

**~777~**

_"Mister Lar'b...?"_

It was like an fragment of a voice, like an echoing memory. He froze, and in that frozen moment the clouds above shifted, ashen moonlight spilled onto a face that was suddenly all too human, and old, and damn plug-ugly. A tramp. It really _was _a tramp, blinking at him with small, pale, rheumy eyes in a wrinkled and whiskery round face and clutching at the cast-off coat like a blanket.

Chris let out a breath, so slowly and harshly it almost rattled in his throat, and lowered his gun with an effort that made his arm hurt. "What th'hell are you doin' here?"

"No' hurtin' none," the old man gabbled, staring with starting eyes at the gun. Something about him rang a faint, out-of-tune memory in Chris's tired mind, but he didn't care enough to follow it. "Honest, Mister, jis' passin' through, thinkin' t'sleep a mite here."

"Not here," Chris said.

"No' botherin' none, folks don't see most times -"

"Well, they're seein' now. Find somewhere else."

"Ain't nowhere but here fer likes a'me, Mister."

Chris thrust a shaking hand into a pocket and drew out several crumpled bills, what remained from a poker game, the one where he'd actually won a hand or two, the last one before everything had gone to hell. He couldn't believe he was doing this, but he just wanted the man out of this place.

"Take this an' find somewhere - _anywhere_ - else."

In the gloom, the little eyes gleamed with a greed faintly familiar, a greed like and unlike what Chris remembered in another green gaze, and clawlike hands reached and snatched away the notes as if they _were _ten thousand. He'd probably drink it all and then sleep in a gutter, but Larabee didn't care.

"Awful gooda ya, Mister, don' suppose ya c'n help an ol' man get -"

Chris put a hand to his gun.

"Jis' goin', jis' goin'," the man backed off, scrabbling up a bundle and a few (probably scavenged, Chris didn't care about _that_, either) things and clutching them as he stumbled away towards the firelight in the main street. "Thankin' ya, Mister, yer a awful good man, an' I won' fergit -"

Whatever he was mumbling was swallowed in the darkness, as he was. Chris watched him go, in silence.

Good man? Hardly. What he felt like was a total fool, letting an idiot ghost story take hold to the point where he'd pretty much ran out on his men... on Ezra... and nearly killed a harmless old drunk who'd been fool enough to salvage a wreck of a coat from the trash.

He stared down at the decayed headstone the tramp had been planning to use as a bedhead. No answers there, most of the carving had worn away years ago, and a single name - SIMPSON - barely readable in the patchy light.

More tired, more cold, than he'd been for years, Chris turned and started back towards the clinic.

The soft light spilled from the doorway as he reached the steps, and someone was waiting on the stairs.

"You okay, pard?" Buck. It figured. Where there was light, there _he_ always was, him and Standish. Up till now. Up till...

"C'mon," Buck went on, and something in his roughened voice made Larabee paused, staring up at him. "Need ya in here. Ez," he faltered, then wiped a hand across his face and smiled, "Ez is askin' about ya."

Chris stopped. "He's woken up?"

"A bit, jis' a bit." Buck didn't seem surprised when his leader pushed straight past him on the way up to the doorway.

They were all there still, almost exactly as they'd been when he'd walked out, but so different. And Ezra...

Ezra shifted a little, barely with them but something - some worry, apart from the pain - creasing his white face, and his voice broken, almost soundless but persistent. "Mist...Lar'bee...?"

He should have known. The damn man never did give up.

He crossed to the chair by the bed - the one JD hastily scrambled out of - and leaned forward, trying to focus Ezra's weak and wandering attention. "Ez."

"Mis... L'bee..." The glassy green eyes flickered past him.

"Ezra," Chris spoke a little louder, though the sheer relief left him with nothing to say, and from the flicker of tired amusement he saw in several pairs of eyes, they all knew it. "What is it?"

"Wrong... card..."

Chris glanced up at Nathan, who was hovering, and at Josiah hovering behind _him_, and then shrugged; they all knew the man was obsessed by cards, it made sense that any dark, fading dream had involved them. Hell, he thought, if the ghost he'd fancied up _did_ come for Standish, the man would probably try to gamble his way out of dying, five card poker, aces always wild, and their very own ace not above cheating Death itself.

"Black... king," Ezra murmured.

Larabee frowned. "What?"

"Black... mah 'pologies, that one's yours. Need 'nother one, 'nother card... need the ace. Mistah Lar'bee," and something changed, Ezra stared past him, dazed and troubled. "Mist... Lar'bee, the money..."

Chris leaned forward more, cupping Ezra's face in one careful hand to turn it so that the man was looking straight at him, and spoke clearly, harshly. "Fuck the money."

Ezra kept staring.

"The money don't matter, Ez." Total confusion shimmered in the pained green eyes at the very idea. "You can tell us about it later. Meaning that you need to pull through, y'hear?"

"Money... don't matter...?" Clearly a thought that scandalous wasn't getting through, and Ezra's restlessness was worse. Josiah lifted him a little; Nathan came forward with one of the foul potions he liked to dose them with, and tried to coax a little of it into Ezra's mouth. Vin and JD and Buck were all crowding around, as if wanting to help - or at least touch - but not sure how.

Ezra seemed to be trying to shake them all off, to tell his leader something, though even he didn't seem to be sure what. But he had to, he _had_ to tell them...

_Fuck the money..._ Chris sighed. Not likely, it seemed. "Tell me, Ezra."

"It's..." Ezra took a deep, shaking breath, visibly trying to think. "It's hidden. Ah put it..."

"Go on," Chris prompted.

"It's well and truly hidden, Chris..." There was now something pleading, desperate in his voice.

"I know that."

"Ah know you don' trust... but ah put it safe, Chris, put it..."

"Where, Ezra?"

"With the... ace o' spades."

There was a silence; they all blinked. "Ohhkay." Whatever _that _meant to Ezra could wait, Chris could see the man calming and fading, with any luck, into sleep. "Ezra -"

"... Simpson."

Chris went cold. "What?"

"Ezra... Simpson. Mah... name, Mist... Lar'bee." Ezra muttered. "One of them at any... didn' care for it overmuch." The glassy eyes returned to him. "Killed _him_ off... 'fore settin' foot in... this charmin'... dust..."

"Yes you did." Chris drew his own deep breath, and pushed back the memory of a old, worn - and meaningless - inscription. He stood up, one hand resting lightly on the side of the bedhead. "An' a damn good thing too. Stick with being' alive, and a Standish instead."

A wavering hand almost lifted, trying to salute... and Ezra fell back, eyes closing again, but this time in good, healing sleep.

**~777~**

It wasn't too late.

Chris stepped back, watching as Nathan fussed, Josiah stayed close, and his men all settled down to rest around their sleeping seventh.

Not too late to tell the man... whatever it was he'd thought all those hours ago. It was hard to recall right now, and even harder to see himself talking deep and meaningful stuff about bein' remembered, and bein' trusted, and bein'... dead wrong, to anyone at all, let alone Ez. But he'd have time, midnight had gone but morning, All Souls' Day, was still a long way away.

He now stayed in the lamplight, feeling the impulse to go out, to try and see through the darkness towards the church and the graveyard, to see for once and all that there _wasn't _anyone there. He knew there wasn't. He knew there couldn't be.

But instead he stood, and watched Ezra's face in sleep, and said no more.

Could be he didn't really _want _to know.

**- the end -**


End file.
